John Woods was a student at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people on campus, including his girlfriend, Maxine Turner. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Woods was a National Merit Scholar who graduated magna cum laude from Virginia Tech in 2007. He moved to Texas to begin his doctoral work in molecular biology at UT-Austin, where he is a National Science Foundation Fellow. John was a founder of Students for Gun-Free Schools in Texas and is now a board member of Texas Gun Sense, an organization that opposes allowing guns on campus while stressing its belief in an individual’s right to bear arms. The Austin Chronicle named Woods Austin’s “best activist” in its 2011 “Best of Austin” awards.
Claire Wilson James, who teaches elementary school in Texarkana, was shot and seriously wounded by Charles Whitman on August 1, 1966, on the University of Texas campus. Shooting from the UT tower, Whitman killed 17 and wounded 72. James, then an 18-year-old anthropology student, spent three months in the hospital and lost her eight-month-old unborn child. Her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, was among Whitman's victims. James, who was a student activist at UT at the time, involved with SDS and the civil rights and anti-war movement, has recently joined in the fight for sensible gun control. Wilson testified before the Texas Legislature in March, in opposition to a bill that would allow the carrying of weapons into college buildings.
Host and Producer of Rag Radio: Thorne Dreyer; Engineer and Co-Producer: Tracey Schulz. Rag Radio (koop.org/ragradio) is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog (theragblog.blogspot.com) and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern time). Contact: ragradio@koop.org. Running time: 57:26.